Posted
by
Zonk
on Thursday February 07, 2008 @02:41PM
from the one-solution-not-my-favorite dept.

Don't squeeze the Sherman writes "At a conference last week, RIAA president Cary Sherman said he didn't support mandatory filtering by ISPs, but in a video clip posted by Public Knowledge, Sherman offers a far more troubling 'solution': installing filters on users' PCs. From Ars Technica's coverage: 'The issue of encryption "would have to be faced," Sherman admitted after talking about the wonders of filtering. "One could have a filter on the end user's computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work."'"

Then, no one will buy a new CPU. Intel and AMD aren't stupid. they know the consumer will run if they add this crap to thier products.

Personally, I might buy a new CPU, but I'd never use it for music. If they suddenly required that I had to have a new CPU to play or download new music then I'd just stop buying music and just listen to the classics I do have and only buy the independent artists out there who don't use the DRM like I do now. I'm not alone in my practice. I personally know a half-dozen people who follow the same practice.

You could buy the cpu if you want and let it attempt to work out whether the result of this innocuous calculation results in a waveform or bitmap which happens to be contained somewhere in its enormous brain.

Besides, there is a bigger reason this will never be implemented:

How can it detect infringement without having something to compare it against?

Remember, google have pretty much said to the big movie people "Sure, we will block all your shit but you have have to give us a copy of everything you want blocking first".

Do you think the RIAA will give us all a full copy of everything we aren't allowed to view or listen to?

The solution is simple: Just don't play ANYTHING unless it passes the DRM check. After all, if people are creating their own music they're just stealing from the music industry anyway. Easy fix. It's pretty much in line with the current industry thinking anyway.

The solution is simple: Just don't play^H^H^H^H^Hbuy ANYTHING unless it passes the DRM check (e.g. "is it DRM-free?")I think it's the only way to end this nonsense. Defang the industry by striking at what gives them power -- profit. When the money dries up, the investors will force the company to change or it will perish. Or, they'll behave like the newspaper industry, deciding to favour biased political viewpoints over profit and they watch their subscriber base drop %20 year-after-year until they are no longer relevant. Any of these is an acceptable outcome.

"if people are creating their own music they're just stealing from the music industry anyway."

That's pretty funny! But it's also very, very close to the totalitarian ideas of the ex-Soviet Union (a Worker's Paradise, dontchaknow?) The State owns everything, and controls the means of production, including the people. We saw how well that worked out.

Not without money they won't -- Congress is only interested in being bribed... uh, I mean "lobbied" by those with bags of money, especially around re-election time. In their death throes (which is fast approaching) they'll certainly lobby for more bad laws. That's inevitable, but once the industry bottoms out, they'll be reduced to having as much influence as the average voter. That is to say, none.

That's pretty funny! But it's also very, very close to the totalitarian ideas of the ex-Soviet Union (a Worker's Paradise, dontchaknow?) The State owns everything, and controls the means of production, including the people. We saw how well that worked out.

now that the competing "workers paradise" is out of the way, our unelected hegemony of massive corporate concerns can look beyond the business of marketing and spinning the wonders of unfettered capitalism and get back to the business of maximizing profit. That is to say: busting the unions and teaching our work force to work faster, longer and harder for less pay, less compensation, less education, and a lower overall quality of life).

What kind of oppressive society would infringe on my natural born right to own the means of production and do with it as I see fit? If I want to own the only automobile factory in the world, (and buy out the other automobile manufacturers) the state should protect my right. If I want to be the sole owner of the means of producing food, only a terrorist would deny me! If a pendemic threatens to kill a million people. Well who are they to infringe on my intellectual property rights? The government should bomb them if they try making generic drugs. Its not my fault if they dont want to pay me whatever price I set? my ideas are my own. I paid my employees fair and square! I own them!

Men have no right to produce for themselves. They'll need to deal with big business if they want to avoid starving to death. They are lucky that they still get free air! If we didn't live in such a pinko bleeding heart society we'd auction off the atmosphere to the private sector. Use the proceeds to lower taxes. Think of how much the GDP would go up if we could turn breathing into a profitable business?

Where does the State get off owning the means of breathing? I thought protecting the minority (the wealthy) from the oppression of the majority (the poor) is what our country was about?

I'm surprised that no one here is referring back to Peter Gutmann's paper on Vista. Yes, it contained some things that were subject to misunderstanding (that could have been construed as factual errors to sticklers) but the point of the paper was this:
Microsoft engineered Vista primarily to benefit content producers, not the people who buy the OS.
And if you will recall, their requirements for Vista certification mostly concerned arm-twisting on the part of Microsoft: Show that you support DRM in all of your hardware or you don't get Vista certification; Oh, and by the way, make sure that your hardware will disable itself in any OS that doesn't toe the DRM line.

Sure, in the case of Vista, the more egregious steps are aimed at HD content, but the lion's share of Vista technology was aimed at digital restrictions management, not end-user functionality. Which is one of the reasons why Vista has been less than a stellar success: Microsoft didn't engineer it for the people who buy it; they put most of the engineering into satisfying the corporate obsession with control. This ticked off all of the end users who had a clue. Sure, the OS has a large lemming constituency.

But Gutmann's paper made clear that Microsoft was unsatisfied with leveraging lock-in of simple computer operating systems. He may have gotten a few things wrong, but he clearly understood the main fact that their (Microsoft's) main motivation is the extension of their hegemony into the realm of content. They ignored older content, concentrating on HD stuff.

It's still an open question of whether this is merely the flailing of a dying dinosaur or not. It will take a few years to see. Dinosaurs survived for a long time after their extinction became inevitable. The real irony of Microsoft is that they, as a computer company of all things, haven't realized that we live in a postmodern, information-age culture. Microsoft is simply one more institution governed by modern, industrial-age assumptions.

In this period of cultural liminality and transition, there are plenty of institutions like Microsoft (and the RIAA and MPAA) who are bewildered by the facts of the new economy. The old economic formulas are based on scarcity of goods, and even according to them, price always approaches incremental cost. Digital content, however, is produced at an effective incremental cost of zero, and the flailing of the RIAA, MPAA, and companies like Microsoft reflects resistance not only to the new paradigm, but also to the prevailing economic rule that price ALWAYS approaches incremental cost. In an economy of abundance, different models must emerge, but media companies and would-be channel monopolies like Microsoft have not even shown the ability to apprehend, much less operate according to, the newly emerging formulas that govern an economy of abundance, and it is unlikely that they will read people like Eben Moglen, Larry Lessig, or Yochai Benkler in an effort to understand the emerging reality, since they aren't interested in understanding; they only view these thinkers as enemies.

But please don't miss the fact that the issue is larger than just the RIAA and the MPAA. The incremental cost of digital media is merely one of the first fields to be impacted by the emerging economic paradigm. It's already affecting publishing and the general field of knowledge and education. Look for industrial-age institutions across the entire economic and political spectrum to be just as resistant to change as the RIAA and MPAA are.

These institutions will fight to preserve their business model, just as the RIAA and MPAA are fighting to preserve theirs. The business models are dinosaurs, and are extinct already de facto, but it will take a while before the walnut-sized brain gets the word that the heart stopped beating some time ago.

Change will be disruptive, but what will drive it is not rage against the existing institutions. Though that will obviously play a role, the real driver will be the emergence of new institu

Intel and AMD will never comply to putting DRM at the processor level, the open source market is too big to entirly cut them out and its obvious any RIAA DRM solution will NEVER make it's way into the Linux kernel.

Intel Pentium D series comes DRM-enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case. This issue was "quitely" passed by Intel but it is possibly the most important feature of the new chipset. Intel steered clear of mentioning the new DRM technology.

Intel officialls have not yet given technical details of how embedded DRM would work saying it was not in the interests of his company to spell out how the technology in the interests of security.

Remember the PentiumII CPU Serial Number fiasco from 1999? That was actually intended as the first step in their roadmap at the time to roll out CPU DRM. They intended add features peicemeal, building it up. They didn't anticipate the backlash to CPU serial numbers. So then Intel go together with Microsoft and IBM and a host of other majors in the computer industry to create the Trusted Computing Group to build an "Industry Standard" compete DRM system on a chip to shove into computers in one fell swoop, with an entire public relations campaign to fight down any backlash, and an entire industry deployment pretty much meaning you would get STUCK buying one in ANY new computer. Don't like it? Tough luck, they intend all new PC's to include at as standard hardware. And then of course later to move it into the CPU. Windows Vista was supposed to make this DRM chip mandatory, but.... well Vista was a fiasco and everything got delayed and stripped out, including the new DRM hardware support. Last I heard Microsoft still intends to make it mandatory in a future release.

Intel's MultiMedia initiative - Viiv - was one gigantic hardware DRM system. Happily that particular project fell flat on its face and has been abandoned.

Intel has a major hard-on for DRM hardware.

And don't expect AMD be some knight in shining armor rushing to the rescue. AMD has been relatively quiet on the subject, but they too built CPU support for it. I don't know if AMD actively want it, but they aren't against it and they sure as hell don't want to get left behind without support for it if/when the Intel puts DRM in all their main-line processors. There's no way AMD could survive if the Latest Greatest release of Windows only ran on Intel CPUS. So yeah, AMD is doing all the work they need to do going along with it.

Then, no one will buy a new CPU. Intel and AMD aren't stupid. they know the consumer will run if they add this crap to thier products.

This is where I sadly think you are wrong - in what would happen - even though you are right in what consumers' reactions should be.

Most "high end electronics" consumers do not have the knowledge or tech savvy to make such a decision, and will continue to buy the "latest and greatest" they are told to buy - unless it sufficiently curtails their actions. Most of the people who will be affected by such a theoretical move (by the CPU manufacturers) are the tech savvy computer community - not the computer users who are otherwise (technologically) computer illiterate.

Unfortunately, they comprise the far larger share of computer users, leaving those of us who are technologically literate, stuck with such theoretical choices because that will thus become all that is available.

It didn't matter how many video geeks knew and understood that Beta was better than VHS, did it? They were the small minority of video users... the same sadly applies to the computer world.

I'd expect (most) everyone here on/. who has the friend/relative/neighbor who comes to them to solve (what to us are simple) computer problems, would remember that when looking at the tech world, what is better (technology wise, user rights wise, performance wise, could keep on going on this list all day) is irrelevant to the mainstream user community, regardless of what the small (yet vocal in places like this) tech oriented community knows is the actual truth.

Just my thoughts... which covers my quota for thinking for the week...:-)

"Unfortunately, they comprise the far larger share of computer users, leaving those of us who are technologically literate, stuck with such theoretical choices because that will thus become all that is available."

Perhaps not if we stop doing free "friends and family" support if they buy the junk.

It didn't matter how many video geeks knew and understood that Beta was better than VHS, did it? They were the small minority of video users... the same sadly applies to the computer world.

Don't ever use this as your example of why DRM is bad, because it's complete bullshit.

Go on, tell me why Betamax was better than VHS. You don't know why. Why? Because it wasn't in the real world. You can spout some meaningless statistics about Betamax, but it had so many things wrong with it, that the "technical superiority" was almost irrelevant.

Lets see a small example of what was wrong with Betamax and why it failed completely and utterly.

1. Beta tapes lasted 1 hour, instead of two. How many 1 hour movies did you watch back then? None? This made the tapes next to useless for movies. Back then, recording movies off of HBO and shit was the thing to do... can't do it with Betamax! Tapes are too short. Those VHS tapes, though, they are just long enough!2. How many Beta tapes did you see for rent back then? A small section in the local video store, maybe? Even if that section started out the same size as the VHS section (30 or 40 tapes each), each month, the VHS section grew, and the Beta section stayed the same or shrank. Why? Because Sony tried to suck the blood out of the market, like we see them continue to do, with their ridiculous licensing requirements.3. Ever go try to buy a Betamax? 30 - 40% more than a VHS in a lot of cases. So, shorter tapes, less availability and they cost more? Yeahhhh, that's going to win market share. That is until VHS started beating down Sony with consumers, then suddenly the prices dropped drastically. There goes Sony again, using their monopoly to rape consumers, then wondering why consumers flee their products in droves when other companies start offering the same or similar things for half the price.4. The last point I'm going to make here is the fact that consumers, Joe Average, could not distinguish between Beta and VHS pictures under any circumstance. The difference was not vast enough like VHS and DVD. On top of this, given the equipment available at the time, even audiophiles really couldn't distinguish between the two, since the TVs and such were so crappy (compared to today) anyway. It would take tens of thousands of dollars of equipment for someone to see the difference. Given that people don't mind MP3's in 128k today, and people still watch VHS when they have DVD available, do you really think the supposed difference between VHS and Beta made a lick of difference?

No, Beta was not superior to VHS, except on paper. In every instance that mattered, Beta failed miserably compared to Beta. Being better on paper is irrelevant, it's real world results that make a difference, and Beta had no advantage there.

Just a nit... Professionals use nothing approaching betamax. They use Betacam SP and Digital Betacam; the electronics and recorded format are different, Betacam is a component format compared to Betamax's composite format, the tape speeds are different, etc. Really the only things the two formats share is the physical format of the cassette box, and the word "Beta" somewhere in the name.

Yeah, see the thing is, I bet I'm older than you and recall the war quite clearly... where as I suspect you were a 5 or 6 year old kid who thought he knew what was going on when Mommy and Daddy bought their deck. I bet you even programmed the time for them, yes?Or 5 hours? Perhaps it is just because I am old enough to remember instead of reading (only part of) what is online about Beta? Very shortly after the initial format was released, Sony addressed that issue, which resulted in longer format tapes (hen

It didn't matter how many video geeks knew and understood that Beta was better than VHS, did it?

Beta wasn't 'better' than VHS. Beta didn't play porn. VHS did. That's why Sony's Betamax format lost. Sony offered a superior technical solution, yes, but in the end it wanted to control what got played in the privacy of your own home. That's why it lost.

And the same thing is replaying itself with Blu-Ray. Since Sony is currently trying to prevent adult products from moving onto Blu-ray, it's unwittingly push

Consumers these days know or have a good idea of what DRM is all about. Many of them do not like it.

I'm not so sure about that second part. Millions of regular consumers download DRMed music from iTunes and the like everyday and don't seem to mind. Perhaps they don't like it, but their dislike is disproportionate to their love of media. Back when MS put DRM into WMP as the default rip/encode method for wma's... I can't tell you how many people I knew that had no idea, and really didn't care. So they filled their My Music folders with tons of locked down music (and sucky quality at that). If consumers d

I think the moral is that it's easy to form opinions based on your peer group, but unless you're a 52 year old white male making $65k a year and living in Boise, ID, your reference group probably doesn't reflect the larger populace.

How long do you think it will take for them to get educated once they notice their 20Gb of downloaded mp3's won't play anymore?

Oh, I dunno... as long as it takes them to realize that they could have stuck with XP, as opposed to buying new Vista compatible versions of various programs because once they upgraded (even with tons of gripes - often exaggerated - about incompatibilities) they still upgraded to Vista and were forced to upgrade (buy newer versions of) software as well.

So, your guess is as good as mine - because I surely don't have on on this subject... just stating the current situation... and even if they "educate" th

All that TCPA does is allow someone to control what happens on a computer. It's not dripping with evil. If you're an admin and your users keep getting rootkits, it's a blessing! Just don't buy a computer where you don't get the master key: problem solved. Why would you want to buy a computer that you don't get to control in the first place?

"Analog Hack". There is always the Analog Hack, Get an audio cable plug one end into Line Out and then the other end into Line In or microphone, Play and open up an other app to record... There you go. If you want to get more detailed take your sound card figure out where it goes the DA Conversion and reroute it to a input device (a harder hack but heck it will work too, and without any loss in quality). It only takes one person to de DRM a file then it can be spread. If there is DRM in the microcode there is no reason why you can't do the work on an older computer wihtout it. Yea it will take longer but once it is done you can share it with the world.

It doesn't matter. The DRM can go as deep as they like but they will never be able to escape virtualization.
Alan Turing has already explained, better than any of us ever could, why their goals are impossible.

The terms copy protection and DRM do not appear anywhere on www.trustedpc.org. They were not the main business objectives, and the resultant chip is not particularly suited to DRM, being poorly defended against owner tampering. The main goals are to secure the user's private keys and encrypted data against external software attack.

They have more reasons in that paper why their chip won't work with DRM.

This is utter bullshit and I can prove it.If TCPA is not about DRM then what is the purpose of TCPA chip?

It it were only to "provide protection of a user's private keys and encrypted data" and "protect sensitive data from many software attacks, including viruses, worms and trojans" then why the content is protected from BACKUP? Why cannot I, the owner of the keys and the computers, copy the keys to an another computer?

No, "DRM is just one possible application of a trust component", DRM is practically the on

Just like those survivalist types who have their own generators and water purification systems for when the world finally falls apart - I've got myself a ZX81 and plenty of cassette tapes for this post tech hell you describe, or as I like to call 'Armageekdon'.

I'll just fire that puppy up, change my name to Mad Betamax and ride out the storm. Yeeee haaaa!

What they want is a giant jukebox that they control, that plays tunes at your request, but there's no way to record the audio in any way. Preferably, you wouldn't even be able to remember it so you can't whistle it. Oh and they want you to pay $1 every time you play, and they want to pay the artist only $.01 and the content provider $.01.

What am I thinking. They don't want to pay the artist or the content provider anything at all.

Wouldn't it be more effective to use the millions (billions?) of dollars you have in the bank to come up with a new business model? They'd still have a pretty big advantage -- after all, if you or I wanted to start a new business model we'd probably have to go to venture capitalists to get the funding.... the labels can just move some money out of the legal fund and into R&D.

I guess using the legal system is what passes for "innovation" these days.

It's funny how the RIAA and MPAA both seem to be using a public forum for their brainstorming technique. Most groups would come to a conclusion in private and announce their final and ultimate strategy. Nope, these guys just come up with idea after idea and announce them before they've even contemplated what they mean or their reprocussions. If my company announced every brain-dead idea we came up with before bouncing it around in the brainstorming sessions we had- we'd kill ourselves off with bad PR alone!

If you read TFA he goes on to admit that it's unlikely to get people to install the filterware themselves, but maybe if they put it into routers and modems....It's worth noting that the decryption doesn't take place there, and it'd be no more effective.

It just seems like this guy has it figured out- he understands what won't work, but he still wants to move foward with the bad plan. If you're going to go down, might as well go down swinging..?

Seriously, it makes me wonder why these people are even let out in public without chaperons. At the very least they should have a lawyer and someone technical around at all time. The technical guy to hopefully whisper "uh, that won't work, and it's a bad idea" in their ear every time they come up with one of these stupid ideas, and the lawyer to say "that's not our official opinion, and this is all off the record" every time one of these guys opens their mouths.

They had a technical guy, then they found out he had the code to their program in on his workstation _and_ in version control, so they sued him for copyright infringement.

As if that weren't bad enough, they found out that their lawyers made _two_ copies of all their contracts, and even gave one away to the other party, so they had to sue him for copyright infringement too.

They caught one of their tech guys trying to show a new tech guy the ropes. Do you have any idea what that means? Copying ideas like that from one person to another without even paying licensing and royalties!!

Actually, if they're intentionally brainstorming in public, it's probably a smart move.
Rather than getting a bunch of clueless newbies in some closed-door meeting to talk about potential 'solutions' for a month only to find out that the eventual solution decided on was a bad one and they have to go back to the drawing board, they can publicly mull over ideas, watch the reaction on the internet, and make judgements that way.
It's distributed decision making. They posit an idea, the internet declares whether or not the idea is a good one, and suggests where the flaws are if it has any. Then they know where to focus their attention. For example, someone in here has already mentioned that the only way to really ensure everyone has such filtering installed is if it's on the processor itself. Now the RIAA/MPAA know to go directly to Intel and AMD to work out their little problem, rather than trying to come up with solutions that they hand out via movie or music.

Having implemented RSA public key encryption/decryption on my malleus, incus and stepdius, I listen to digitally archived music by dd'ing the GnuPG-encrypted files directly into/dev/dsp, deciphering the tunes on the fly, in-ear, using my memorized private key.

You fail it. Information wants to be *free*. Why should I pay hard-earned money just to listen to a band for an hour or two, and end up empty-handed? I deprive *no one* of *anything* if I have a mate let me in the back entrance of a club. Sneaking into concerts is the new downloading music.

You fail it. Information wants to be *free*. Why should I pay hard-earned money just to listen to a band for an hour or two, and end up empty-handed? I deprive *no one* of *anything* if I have a mate let me in the back entrance of a club. Sneaking into concerts is the new downloading music.

Nice try, but fail. Your body takes up space that otherwise could be occupied by a paying customer. Until they start building 'Nightclubs of Holding' that is.

You're assuming that there are paying customers. Given the number of people who seem to think they're entitled to free music, I'd expect to see much longer lines at the backdoor than the ticket office.

I don't think anyone thinks they're "entitled" to free music. I think people would gladly pay the creator of said music a reasonable amount, say a nickel a song, for the music if it was made easily attainable and useful (no DRM). What the RIAA members want is for people to pay a huge amount the majority of which goes to a bunch of leaches and bums who in no way, shape or form contribute anything to the music while enslaving and controlling anyone who has the audacity to step into the realm that they have

Of course not. Linux is a "hacker" operating system that is only used by people who try to circumvent safeguards that are used only for the protection of the children and good of the economy. Anyone using such a nefarious operating system doesn't deserve to be entertained, individually, at the low low fee of 0.01c per frame, per eyeball, per single non-sharable viewing.

I can do one better. I had a friend that was convinced I was pirating DirectTV because I had a ReplayTV. After all it ended in TV and let me watch shows that it got from a DirectTV box. Now this was right after the ReplayTV was released, so it was the first DVR he had heard of, but still...

Of course not. Linux is a "hacker" operating system that is only used by people who try to circumvent safeguards that are used only for the protection of the children and good of the economy.

But what's the big difference between Linux and Solaris in this respect? The web sites of two of the four major members of the IFPI and RIAA are hosted on the Solaris operating system, which is under a free software license [wikipedia.org].

I'm sure this response is related to M$ Vista. Has everyone forgotten about all the DRM associated dross associated with M$ flagship product?I guess that very few people realize much of the Vista kernel is devoted to something very much related to not correctly playing "content" if the "chain" of protection is not complete. (IE: the HI-RES monitor connected to the machine has no (or revoked) keys.)

To do this, M$ encrypt the video data BEFORE sending it to the video card on a potentially hostile databus. (Th

So we're talking ubiquitous DRM that is transparent (or at least, not terribly intrusive upon the overall user experience), doesn't piss people off, doesn't get broken, can be deployed everywhere, does not add too much complexity to playback devices.

So, is Mr. Sherman planning on buying every music consumer a pony too? That has as much likelihood of happening as the DRM.

I think it's apparent that it's only their complete ignorance of how technology works--evidenced by these ridiculous statements--that lets them have any hope that their organization can possibly continue to be relevant in the face of the increasing numbers of technological workarounds for every countermeasure that they come up with.

One might get the impression that were they to receive adequate education in The Way Things Work, they might possibly lose all morale altogether...not necessarily a bad thing, methinks.

Perhaps we should sign them up for a correspondence course in basic computer science?

I think it's apparent that it's only their complete ignorance of how technology works - it is more fundamental than that. They have no idea how anything works.It's as if they see the world as a magic place where everything happens on a 2-dimensional screen, where people are really just cardboard cut-outs with no real depth at all. The ideas of cause an effect are not really universal or understandable. They can't understand those ideas thus the cardboard cut-out figures on the other side of the money tra

this is total BS. just a worthless executive filling the people who pay his wage with a load of nonsense so they'll keep paying. stop funding RIAA now and the companies would save a hell of a lot of money.

ISP: Hello, how can I help you?
Advanced User: My Internet stopped working. I can't figure it out.
ISP: Hmmm... What version of Windows are you using?
User: Well, It's umm... It's not windows. It's OS/2.
ISP: Sir, if you read the contract changes we made last week, you would know that the Internet needs Windows now.
User: ???

I have better things to do with my PC than protect your artificial and increasingly indefensible "rights". People and organizations buy PCs to conduct business, science and for their entertainment, not to put money in your coffers you greedy fuck!

Microsoft would love it, love it, love it. This would mean that any operating system whose kernel can be recompiled by the end-users would be illegal under DMCA -- because it would become a device for circumventing copyright protection mechanisms built into the computer system. Say, how do we get the OTHER half of the server market? Well, let's make the competition illegal.

If this doesn't clearly demonstrate how completely out of touch with the current era (and reality) the RIAA top brass is, then nothing will. I would think that the client-companies would be eager to replace him (and all others who are similarly out of touch). That or I'd think the client-companies' shareholders would be looking to make some replacements... With people like this running the show, it's no wonder the client-companies are losing money...

But in 1995 I honestly believed that no company would be stupid enough to automatically run code delivered in an email message, and in 1997 that Microsoft would be forced by public opinion to back down on the obviously absurd integration of the browser and the desktop, and in 2000 that people would reject an operating system with components to lock them out of their own computer... after all, dongles had proven to be a passing fad, surely people were wising up to things like this.

I no longer believe in any limits to the complaisance and naivete of the computer-using public.

What planet is that guy from? We don't encrypt our music we compress it. Why would I download or install any codec that the RIAA supports? MP3 will rule for years into the future mainly because its a standard that RIAA can't kill as of yet.I've never paid for any music in my life other than some music appreciation cds that I had to get in college. I've never felt the need to go out and buy any form of recorded music. Radio has been fine for me. This doesn't mean that I don't have many mp3s. I have tons. T

The only way to make it work is to mandate the filters or have ISPs mandate that users install them to get on the Internet. The consumer backlash from such a plan would be like the force of a thousand supernovas, and it's hard to visualize this happening.

Actually, it's not hard to visualize this happening. Most people connect with what, one of four major ISPs in the US, and there are usually no more than three competing ISPs, except in big cities? That's only four companies, each headed by a relatively few number of individuals whose motives are driven by shareholder (not necessarily customer) demands. If the MAFIAA writes a solid-gold check to Comcast, Qwest, Verizon, and Time-Warner, you can bet that find ways to impose an end-user filter on your PC as a requirement to connect, and with a limited number of broadband ISPs in the area, you can bet that people will suck it up and deal with it.

This boils down to tagging. A file would have to be tagged in some way that is has a copyright. It would also need to know who DOES have the right to listen and distribute. Don't forget that every work not 95 years old is out of copyright in the US and can be freely shared, copied, traded, etc. Also, there is the possibility that people may have been given the right to share, copy, trade, etc a piece of music that has a current copyright.

I'm just not sure how any filter could determine all of the characteristics without some sort of tagging. Following that logic, all that would need to be done to circumvent the DRM would be to remove/modify such a tag. DRM like this is easy to defeat and has been done.

You want me to run your software? I'll consider it, but you have to remember that my computer is just that... MY computer. Time on it will cost you just like it would cost from a mainframe from IBM. How much are you willing to pay me to run this software that only benefits you? If this takes too much RAM, CPU the overflow charges may be... up there.

Your security is not my concern, and should not be expected to be my concern. Otherwise you also have a responsibility to make sure no one breaks into my house. (You should be happy to, they could steal my CDs!)

Of course, the conditions under which I'm willing to run your software may change without announcement from time to time but will still be considered binding, much like whatever the "licensing" consists of on a CD is this week. Like your CD licensing, the wording behind this agreement will never be readily available. Perhaps I'll add extra charges for running the software on weekends...

RIAA reports that new copyright filters will be powered by eating babies and cute puppies. Everyone else says, "I'd like to be surprised by this turn of events, but it's really perfectly in line with their past actions."

The RIAA, through SoundExchange, collects a toll on every song played on internet radio. But get this - they collect for music from bands who aren't RIAA members! They collect for every song, no matter what. Because nobody would ever play a song for free. And they hold that money until you come to claim it (you have to join SoundExchange to claim it, btw).